It’s now been almost 4 months since Lauren Spierer disappeared from Bloomington, Indiana. An IU student, she was last seen walking back from a downtown bar, presumably intoxicated. The town has been exhaustively searched by police and local volunteers, yet nobody has found any promising clues. It is as if she just vanished without a trace.
What do you think happened?
Possibilities:
Murder:
She was abducted, murdered, and then her body was dumped somewhere in the area, either in one piece or in several pieces.
She was abducted, murdered, and her body was kept by the murderer as a trophy of some kind, or concealed somewhere on the killer’s property.
She was abducted, but not killed, and is being held captive as a slave - something that is not without precedent.
Accidental death; deliberate concealment of body:
She was hit unintentionally by a hit-and-run driver, who then hid the body somewhere to dispose of the evidence.
She had been “partying” too hard with her friends, did too much cocaine or another stimulant, and overdosed. (She had a heart condition.) Then her very stupid “friends” buried her body somewhere.
Misadventure:
She drunkenly wandered into an unsafe area, was killed accidentally, and her body simply has not been found. This is exactly what happened to Wade Steffey, another Bloomington resident (though studying at Purdue) who stumbled into a high-voltage room while drunk and was electrocuted.
No way to know for sure, but my best guess is #5. (All speculation, of course)
She was <5’ tall and <100#, she had a heart condition for which she required medication, and she was rumored to have been mixing cocaine and alcohol. Hanging out with a bunch of guys with presumably much higher tolerances and much lower risk factors, the chances of over-indulging would seem to be quite high. Under those circumstances, if she were to have encountered a medical emergency, it’s easy to imagine these kids panicking and making the foolish decision to not call 911 and hope she would recover on her own. If she didn’t recover, and instead died, it’s not hard to imagine that they panicked further and covered it up so that their drug use and failure to call 911 wouldn’t come to light.
If so, those guys did a pretty good job of hiding the body, eliminating evidence and keeping their mouths shut for a bunch of college students.
I remember the Wade Steffey situation, I was at IUB at the time. It was a totally unexpected outcome to that, I don’t think anyone thought he would’ve walked into a room and gotten electrocuted like that.
I have no idea, but it’s not difficult to hide a body in that area. First, the IU campus is pretty large, with many buildings (both university halls as well as residences), and therefore, lots of places to stash a body.
More likely to me though, is if she were actually abducted, the criminal probably dumped her body in the woods. Bloomington is in a more or less rural area (it’s not in the middle of nowhere, nor is it in a major city, like say, UCLA), and as you get out of Bloomington proper, you can hide a body in probably thousands of acres of woods nearby. The Brown County State Park for instance isn’t far (there are several other forests nearby – the Hoosier National Forest, Morgan-Monroe State Forest, and Yellowwood State Forest to name three).
On the other hand, it could be simply a tragic death by misadventure, considering her medical condition (option 5 in the OP).
Oh - I should add, there’s one more possibility. When we talk about someone being “abducted,” usually it’s understood to mean a stranger grabbing them. But in this case, it’s conceivable that Lauren could have been taken away and murdered by someone she knew - a jealous boyfriend or just some acquaintance who wanted to kill here. It’s actually possible that there is a young psychopath among Spierer’s crowd of rich, coked up, East Coast friends.
I live near Bloomington, and I think everyone is at a loss to even guess what happened to Lauren. The tone I get from the parents and media is that of the 3 or 4 college boys who saw her last–all of whom have lawyers and refuse to talk to anyone–at least one of them must have some information they aren’t sharing.
I don’t know. I tend to think accidental OD and subsequent bad decisions on the parts of the people she was with…but I just don’t know. It wouldn’t be that hard to snatch a petite woman off a deserted street and just keep on driving, you know?
Jill Behrman was missing for three years before her body was found in the Morgan-Monroe State Forest, and someone finally was charged in her murder. It’s not impossible that Lauren’s body will turn up eventually–but it could be a long, long time.
Her poor family. I can’t imagine what they’re going through.
I wonder if Lauren went willingly with someone who offered her a ride, or if she was just forcibly grabbed? If she was drunk and tired, it’s conceivable that she could have jumped in a car with a stranger without thinking.
I will say that the reluctance of her “friends” to say anything leads me to suspect that they know something, and are not saying it because they’re afraid of getting it pinned on them (assuming that they themselves are totally innocent.) And, of course, it’s possible that they were the ones who caused her death, either deliberately or by accident.
As a life long Resident of this area, having hunted both game and mushrooms extensively throughout the area all my life. Myself and 3 son’s along with friends got right out and searched the most rural of areas. Areas we knew IU students to both hangout and areas where they do many of the outdoor studies in the surrounding forest, having considered one or all of these male students involved most likely knew these areas well.
As the days turned into weeks and the weeks into months, more and more people came out, more groups of searchers, some professional, some like us, just people who knew the land. I guess at this point, knowing the ground we covered, realizing how we all overlapped each others ground coverage, also considering any disruption to the soil or ground would have been picked up by at least one of the hundreds of dogs out searching, also just trying to wrap my mind around the size and magnitude of the search that took place, it is extremely difficult to accept that she was disposed of in those short few hours and was not found. Also at this point in it all, I have no doubt at least two of those boys were involved, the very last two to see her, Cory and Mike. Seeing her mother on national TV and listening to her words is what leads me to believe this theory so firmly. There are two possibilities here in her location in my opinion, one being the obvious and expansive elephant in the room, AKA Monroe Lake, the second of which is help from an outsider, possibly a parent fearing his sons future and aiding in the quick relocation of Lauren to an area completely out of the confines of possibility, rendering her impossible to find. Those college kids could not have did it so perfectly by themselves. I also think it was either a date rape gone bad, or the sharing of X, with her condition, X, being more common on these streets here locally then cocaine, and having more recourse on the cardiac function, and certainly so for someone with low QT. In the last images of Lauren she was really, really, really happy and had a smile stuck on her face
I’m sure all the women who have lived through date rape would argue that date rape is inherently bad without requiring the addition of murder.
This world sickens me. People without integrity are not people at all. They are cowards and should be ashamed of themselves but instead are self-centered and focused on self-preservation.
Scum. Karma is a bitch.
You get out of this world what you put into it and in time all wrongs are set right.
I only wish I could be there to see the squirm of those responsible when the hand of the righteous is laid upon them.
Own your shit. If you fuck up own it. If you are reading this and you know whats up, there is only one thing you can do to set things right, tell the story. This will follow you the rest of your life and there is nothing worse than a heavy heart.
For all those speculating. STFU. Think of the family. Think of the friends. You are providing no value. That’s someone’s whole world you are talking about. Remember that.
What about this merits comment? Do you want recognition? Congratulations, you were at Purdue when Wade Steffey disappeared…please, enlighten us as to the ways of the world.
Lets all turn our attention to this idiot.
Please, tell us more…this shit is a waste of my time…if there ever was a god they surely tuned out long ago from utter disappointment.
Congratulations you are now the top idiot in this thread.
Just a heads-up: Before you Googled up this thread and posted to it, the last time someone said anything on the subject was a single post a month ago, and the topic was started back in September last year which is when all the other posts were done. Now due to your digging it up, it’s back in the public eye and multiple more posts were added.
So if you would prefer that people don’t speculate on the topic, that maybe wasn’t a wise thing to do.
